And I have to say… I’m don’t have degree in seeing but to me Taste looks a LOT like taste. However, most of you probably know that the German word for taste is der Geschmack … or at least you know it’s something with smack or shmack or something.Die Tasteon the other hand means the key. Not in sense of lock, but in sense of buttons. A piano, a computer keyboard, the new iPhone Press® … they all have Tasten. Looks like German was dancing again. It has done the twist… haha… or has it? Let’s find out :)

Die Taste and the taste are not just two words that are spelled the same by coincidence. They are related. So who messed up, German or English. Place your bets now.The origin is the Latin verb tangere. Tangere is where words like tactile, tangible or contact come from… words that still conserve the meaning of tangere… to touch. Seems like German stayed the course. So what happened in English? Well, English and German both imported the verb from Old French taster which in turn came from Latin taxtare, an intensified version of tangere. Think of a merchant touching some fabric or something trying to determine the quality, the value. That is taxtare. Touching with an added notion of examining. By the way… this idea of examining, estimating value is also the base for the word tax. Anyway, taxtare was then imported to French, the language that invented the Gourmet. No wonder it soon took on the side notion of checking out food by mouth. Them, English imported it, and first it could mean to touch, to examine but also to take a small samplein context of food. And that’s what it eventually focused on. So the development is something like this … touching, checking out by touching, checking out, checking out samples of food, taste. Makes sense once you know it. All right.

The German version of the verb, tasten, has stayed true to the original idea of touch. BUT… there is a biiiig difference between the verbs to touch and tasten. They’re pretty much never translations for each other. Why not? Because you can touchsomething, but you cannot really tasten something. Tasten is not about making contact, it’s about the motions you do. Like… you can actually tastenwithout touching. Tasten has this notion of search. Here’s an example:

So yeah…the core idea of tasten is definitely touch. Heck the German term for sense of touch is der Tastsinn . But if you need a translation for to touch, you’d need anfassen or berühren. Oh or anstasten… which brings us to the prefix versions of the verb.Antastendoes mean to touch, but only in sense of “undoing untouchedness”… uhm… like… anstasten kind of means to not leave untouched. I don’t know how else to say… antasten is touching something that is untouched and shouldn’t be touched, mostly in context with abstract things. Let’s just look at two examples…

Die Regierung hat versprochen, die Mehrwertsteuer nicht anzutasten.

The administration has promised not to touchthe VAT/leave the VAT untouched.

I hope those give you an idea. Next, there is rantasten(the r-version) or the formalererer herantasten. This one combines the notion of care, that tasten has with the idea of search. Like… imagine your foot hurts and you’re trying to pinpoint the exact origin of the pain. You would start somewhere a bit remote and slowly, carefully close in. That is (he)rantasten in the most literal sense. But it’s mostly used in abstract contexts and is not about actual touching.

The next one is abtasten, and this one is full out touching and full out examination. It’s what air port security does when they pat you down but it’s also used in context of gathering information about a surface via a laser or radar or something.

And… I think that’s pretty much i… oh no wait, we didn’t actually do any examples for die Taste. Here are the German names of some of the most important Tasten

die Leertaste – space (“empty key”)

die Entertaste/Eingabetaste – enter

die Feststelltaste– caps lock (“set fast/fixed key”)

die Rautetaste – hash key/pound key … this one “#”.

And then there is die Tastensperre(the keylock) and of course die Tastatur which is the keyboard.Cool :). Now we’re really done. This was our little look at the family of die Taste. The very core of it is touch but it has the added notion of examination. In English that slowly shifted toward examining by mouth, in German it hasn’t changed much and that’s why we have a really nice pair of false friends today :). As always, if you have any questions or suggestions just leave me a comment. I hope you liked it and see you next time.

Yeah, I think you’re right. It mostly comes with “nicht”. That makes sense, too, because if you actually were to “antasten” it you’d probably proceed and do more :). As for contexts… yes, laws, money, abstract things like dignity are the context you usually use it with. I wouldn’t use it for a cake on a window sill, though that wouldn’t sound odd either.

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Jeff F

Die Tastatur as the word for keyboards in instrumental contexts reminds me of a whole world of complex terminology related to keyboard instruments in German – you’ve got Tasteninstrument, Taste (not to be confused with the other ‘key’, Tonart or [Noten]schlüssel, ‘clef’) Tastatur, Klaviatur, Klavier, Piano, Flügel, Pianino, and a host of historical terms like Pianoforte, Fortepiano, Hammerklavier, Hammerflügel, Cembalo, Clavicembalo, Kielflügel, Spinett, Virginal (the latter five being words for harpsichord or types of harpsichord), etc. For an English speaker studying music history it makes for quite a bit of confusion – such as when talking about Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, due to the number of meanings associated with Klavier. And I haven’t even brought organs, clavichords, or synthesizers into the mix.

Hahaha… you seem to know your way around by now :).I had “musicology” as a minor and all that stuff confused me too. And I wouldn’t really know how to tell them apart. The common ones are “Piano”, “Klavier”, “Flügel” and “Cembalo” and of course Tonart and Notenschlüssel… the rest is only for “Auskenners” :)

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Jeff F

I was actually wondering…Is “Klavier” or “Piano” the more common modern term for a piano? Like, if I say “Ich spiele Klavier” does the listener immediately think of a piano or do they think the person is saying they play keyboard instruments in general?

This doesn’t sound very idiomatic to me. German actually also makes a distinction between keyboard and piano… like… people distinguish between “Keyboardunterricht” and “Klavierunterricht”. And there are books targeted at people learning “Keyboard” and other for people learning “Klavier”. I think it’s mainly for “Anschlagsdynamik” which many keyboard players do not bother with, at least in the beginning, and also for the missing pedals and the automated chords and all that. But “Piano”… everybody knows the word but when it comes to actual phrasings people go with “Klavier” most of the time.

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Ruth

Another of the lovely extras from this blog. All the different terms used can be confusing, too, for those who just listen to the music and want to know what the instruments are. Kielflügel is new to me. Nice. The cutest one I know in English is the triangular spinet, abbreviated to triangle. Interestingly, what we call in English the “keys” on a wind instrument are not “Tasten”, but “Klappen”.

I’d say “grope” works well for tasten in the sense of feeling around blindly to try to find something (although there is also the transitive version “to grope someone” which is Not Okay). “Feel for sth.” or “fumble (around)” work just fine too.

Yeah, I knew the “grope someone” meaning, that why it sounded a bit odd to me. Like “creeping up to the keys”. How would the sentence be

– I grope for my keys in the dark.

? Can I also just “grope”? Or can I grope my keys? Danke :)

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George

“I groped for my keys in the dark” would be fine, and, to me anyway, doesn’t have any of the connotations of “groping someone”. “I groped my keys”, on the other hand, would be decidedly strange. Both senses of groping have the implication that you can’t see where your hands are, whether because it’s dark, or because your eyes are, well, otherwise engaged.

Hahahha… nice :)…. where’s that joke from, though? Like… does it exist in English??? I would have though the punch line only works for German.

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Wes Velkov

It doesn’t work in English. I reconstructed the story once told to my night-school class by the teacher. I reconstructed the story as best as I could remember but my German memory has forgotten almost all of the rules. In order to keep the themes Taste and Klavier I left it to GOOGLE to thrash out a poor but reasonable account. Not to mention, to translate verbs into the imperfect, the story needs telling in the style of Grimm. WES

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M inna

Can I ask you any questions that I have, about German language of course, that may not have been covered by your topics? thanks Minna